This is for every teacher who refuses to be blamed for the failure of our society to erase poverty and inequality, and refuses to accept assessments, tests and evaluations imposed by those who have contempt for real teaching and learning.

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Tuesday, May 24, 2016

Hey, You Have Been Teaching 3 ½ Hours, Why Not Open Up Your Own School?

By Dr. Michael Flanagan, member of the BAT Leadership Team

The Chancellor of New York City Public Schools, Carmen Farina, and
Mayor Bill de Blasio have recently instituted a reform policy of merging
small schools that are struggling with other schools in an effort to
promote success. The small schools in question are usually located in
buildings known as “educational campuses.” These campuses used to be
large comprehensive high schools and middle schools, but since 2002 have
been sub-divided. For example, Taft High School is now called the
William H. Taft Educational Campus. Roosevelt High School is now the
Theodore Roosevelt Educational Campus. Each campus houses five or six
small schools. The goal of these new mergers is to give “failing” small
schools a chance to “turn around” prior to being taken over by the state
and handed over to "receiverships". Placing schools into receiverships
is the result of Governor Cuomo’s new education law pushed through with
our state budget in 2015. Schools labeled as failing had to show fast
improvements or be placed into receivership, and most likely be taken
over by charter school operators. Before falling into receivership, the
schools were awarded turnaround funding ($154 million for 94 schools)
and allowed to modify teachers’ working conditions to provide longer
days, extra tutoring and other benefits to students. Even with the extra
funding many schools were not able to demonstrate enough rapid
improvement. So now the Mayor’s new position is that smaller schools
lack support services and would benefit from combining together. Not as
well-publicized is that many of these small schools will be merging with
charter schools. Yes, that sound you heard was the other shoe dropping.

Now, I enjoy when policy makers mandate sweeping changes as
much as the next guy; to heck with the impact on children and
communities. However, the idea of creating larger schools as a means for
improvement just plain cracks me up. I am sure all of the teachers who
were excessed or forced into early retirement during the small schools
initiative of our previous Mayor, Billionaire reformer Michael
Bloomberg, are laughing as well. You see, their careers were destroyed
because of this now obviously failed experiment. During Emperor
Bloomberg’s 12-year reign (2001 – 2014), one of his earliest education
reform tactics was to break up large public schools and create hundreds a
“mini-schools”. The political rhetoric used at the time was that large
schools were failing and that smaller schools would be more
accommodating to a child’s needs. Vilification of teachers unions,
blaming veteran teachers for the failures, and eliminating seniority
protections were tactics used to justify the dismantling of the larger
schools. Teachers who argued that the reason for poor academic
performance was the high poverty rate in the communities were not only
figuratively, but literally, dismissed. Students just needed to be fed
their daily bowl of grit and rigor in a small school setting to succeed.

Bloomberg’s push to shut down large schools fit right into the
education reform plans of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s New
Visions grant program. New Visions provided $150 million dollars to fund
the NYC small schools initiative. It is always fun when a couple of
billionaires decide what is best for our children. Gates eventually
invested $2 billion in this plan nationwide before abandoning it. The
New Vision grants allowed for the purchase of upgraded technology,
desks, materials and staff development. With all of that money on the
table, the media and the politicians could not wait to swing the
proverbial wrecking ball into our most underprivileged and vulnerable
school districts.

Every wannabe principal with two or three years
experience was writing proposals to secure some of that Gates grant
money and open a new school. To obtain the money, these new schools had
to have a theme and a cute name, like: New Explorers High School, The
Urban Academy for Careers in Sports, The Knowledge and Power Academy
International High School, The West Bronx Academy for the Future, etc,
etc. If you could fill out an application and submit a proposal, most of
the time you got yourself a school. These New Vision proposals did
require you to partner with an outside organization. That organization
would co-sponsor the new schools, and also share control of the grant
money. Honestly, I am not sure if any of these proposals were ever
turned down. The new schools also led to a large number of 26 year-old
“instaprincipals” popping up out of nowhere. Few had even taught for
more than two years.

Once the proposals for the new schools were
accepted, the yard sale was on! Existing schools became wholesale
markets where these new principals and outside sponsors could
cherry-pick the incoming students to fill their rosters. They were not
mandated to accept students with special needs in the same proportion as
the existing schools. In order to close down the larger schools, the
Department of Education would first conduct a dog and pony show to
pretend they were investigating whether or not the school was failing
and needed to be closed. We, the staff in the targeted school would fall
all over ourselves to show our best work, the love and dedication we
had for the school, and to discuss the frustrations and disappointment
we had with a system that sets up students to fail. Endless cadres of
suits would fill our classrooms and observe the hard work we were doing
in the most difficult situations. Then they would submit reports that
had already been written before they ever set foot in our building.

Next, they would begin to carve up the school like a turkey on
Thanksgiving, taking the choicest pieces for themselves. You would be
teaching your class and these DOE guys would walk in with blueprints and
survey equipment to set up the school du jour. They would take the best
classrooms and monopolize the common facilities like cafeterias and
gyms. We in the closing schools were left with the closets and the old
bathrooms to teach in. The new principals demanded separate entrances,
and our students were told to not even walk through the halls where the
new schools were located. Rules were put into place so that each school
could treat their students as special, compared to the closeout school’s
students. Meanwhile, the small schools had little discipline and their
students basically had carte blanche to run the building. See, 26 year
old principals might be chock full of energy and enthusiasm, but they
don’t know a damn thing about earning the respect of students and
maintaining discipline. That is a fact.

In order to disregard the
UFT contract, the “blame the teacher” rhetoric was ratcheted up. The
edict was that when the large schools were being phased out, 50% of the
existing staff had to leave. This is where the anti-union narrative came
into play. To destroy these schools they would have to grease some
pockets and change a few rules. Inevitably, the teachers removed were
the most experienced teachers who had the highest salaries. When
Bloomberg assumed mayoral control of the schools, one strategy used was
to give principals autonomy of their school budgets. Before mayoral
control school budgets were de-centralized, if a school needed a new
teacher, one was assigned by the Board of Education. Now, principals
were looking for the cheapest human capital. The only problem was the
pesky collective bargaining agreements that protected teachers’ rights.
So, those contracted rights had to be violated. Experienced educators
with many years of service were too expensive. They also knew their
rights. Those teachers were either excessed, forced into something
called the Absent Teacher Reserve pool, or retired. This end run around
of seniority protections was then ratified into our UFT contract when
teachers were thrown a bone of a raise after years of wage freezes.

ATR teachers became second-class citizens with fewer rights and
protections than other teachers. Of course, in order to destroy the
public schools, a corrupt bargain had to be made with union leadership
to give away our hard fought rights, and so it was. Countless teachers
were pushed out of their careers, only to be replaced by the six-week
Teach For America warriors who took a crash course in teaching theory
and came in to “save the schools.” Then fled in droves.

…Or became 26 year-old principals.

The experience of senior teachers was not respected. The propaganda
taught to TFA recruits was that older teachers were the reason the
schools were failing. The recruits arrived in these new schools with an
unmatched level of arrogance and ignorance. I will admit that it was
satisfying watching these TFA’ers get eaten alive when they tried to
teach their classes without the benefit of discipline and experience.
Except for the damage being done to the children in the classrooms, of
course, it was actually kind of enjoyable watching them cry and quit in
en masse.

Gates abandoned the small school movement to focus on
Common Core and high stakes testing as his next attempt to privatize
schools. But this was not before an entire generation of students was
damaged, and the careers and reputations of countless teachers and staff
were destroyed. Creating smaller schools with new names and fancy desks
doesn’t solve the main problem, poverty. These smaller schools “failed”
with the same frequency as the larger schools did. Except now our
already-limited school budgets are being siphoned off by management
companies, tech suppliers, and outside vendors. These vulture
philanthropists take the money and run leaving the discarded carcasses
of the community schools that had been the foundation of our
neighborhoods. It was like the slaughter of the bison on the Great
Plains in order to starve out the native peoples and steal their lands.
They left our schools rotting and bloated on the streets of the city,
while they counted their money and worked towards the new methods of
public school genocide; charter schools, vouchers, Common Core,
anti-tenure lawsuits, etc. etc.

So, yeah, when I see these brand
new administrators come in to scout out locations for school mergers I
am, what you might call, suspect. As teachers they were just crying in
their classrooms like yesterday. By reformer logic they must be
qualified to be an administrator. “Hey, you have been teaching 3 ½
hours, why not open up your own school”? What could go wrong? The more
things change, the more things remain the same.